


To Victory

by flourwings



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Multi, Post-Barricade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 18:26:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4971673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flourwings/pseuds/flourwings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Musichetta is sifting through the collection of mostly broken bottles behind the bar. The clink of glass rouses the serving-maid Matelote from her demi-sleep, a bristling boar rising from its knees at the telltale sound of its prey.</p><p>“Hey,” she says, as Musichetta rescues an intact bottle from its fallen peers. “Hey, are you going to pay for that?” It is a ridiculous question. The Corinthe’s furniture lies broken in the street. Musichetta has killed two soldiers today. The whole of France has been reborn. </p><p>"Just with my jubilance," Musichetta says, grinning sweetly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Victory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PaintedSarcasm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaintedSarcasm/gifts).



In the dark of your sleep, she makes herself known. You can smell her, the familiar wine-and-burnt-bread scent of Musichetta.

“Wake up,” she says. She is shaking you, leaning over you. There are dim noises all around her. Her voice is muted, as if through glass. “Wake up,” she says again, even as your eyes are opening.

She turns her head to look at something you can’t see. Above her, the sky is pink with the breaking dawn, and the tops of buildings look soft and hazy. Your mouth and lungs are full of smoke.

“What—” you try to say.

“Oh god, Joly!” she says, turning back, moving close to you. “You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re going to be fine.” It sounds like she is speaking from far away. She kisses your forehead, and then your mouth, and then your cheek. “Just stay awake, love. Don’t sleep.” Her grip on your shoulders is tight enough to hurt.

“What are you— shouldn’t— shouldn’t be here—” you say. You try to sit up, but you feel impossibly heavy. She smiles down at you, shakily, and you realize that there is blood on her face.

“We’re all here,” she says. “Don’t you see, Joly? We came.”

Above you, a window shatters quietly. The pieces of glass are brilliant in the morning sun. All around you, the dust is settling. You can’t understand. “Who?”

“Paris,” she says.

\--

When you get back into the Corinthe, Bossuet is waiting and worrying, sitting against the wall in the billiard hall. There is a bandage around his leg just above the knee. Next to him is the Widow Hucheloup, her two serving-maids dozing off with their heads on each of her broad shoulders. At a table, Grantaire is introducing himself reluctantly to the experience of success, as Feuilly sits beside him and weeps with incredulous joy.

Bossuet holds out his arms, and you fall into him, your face buried in the crook of his shoulder and your knees bracketing his waist.

“Thank god,” he says, petting your back absently in relief. “Are you hurt? What happened?” This last directed to Musichetta, who leans trembling against the bar.

“There was an explosion. He got bashed pretty good on the head,” she says.

“Brief loss of consciousness, confusion, nausea,” you list into the dirty fabric of his shirt. Outside, you can hear songs and whooping laughter. “Headache, and rapidly diminishing tinnitus. I definitely have a concussion, and maybe some mild injury to my inner ear.”

“Yeah?” he says softly. His tired fingers card through your hair, careful as he finds the tender spot. You sigh and slump further against him.

“There was an explosion,” you say. “I got bashed pretty good on the head.”

Musichetta is sifting through the collection of mostly broken bottles behind the bar. The clink of glass rouses the serving-maid Matelote from her demi-sleep, a bristling boar rising from its knees at the telltale sound of its prey.

“Hey,” she says, as Musichetta rescues an intact bottle from its fallen peers. “Hey, are you going to pay for that?” It is a ridiculous question. The Corinthe’s furniture lies broken in the street. Musichetta has killed two soldiers today. The whole of France has been reborn.

"Just with my jubilance," Musichetta says, grinning sweetly.

Hucheloup shushes Matelote quietly. “Let her be,” she says in her rough familiar voice. “We are all lucky to still be here to drink at all.” She is tearing apart shirts to make bandages, and you watch her with bleary eyes, marveling. It makes sense, you think. Her fingers, plagued for years by scalding soup and the broken dishes of drunken law-students, could not be defeated by something so small as barricade-building or rebellion. Calloused, and colored with gunpowder char, they work tirelessly on.

Against her shoulder, Gibelotte, who even as a serving maid was perpetually half-asleep, has now as a successful revolutionary succumbed entirely. Her pale brown hair falls in a curtain over her weary face, and she is snoring softly.

“We did it,” says Feuilly from his table, finally recovered enough to speak. Grantaire lets out an involuntary hiccup of laughter. Feuilly slaps him genially on the back and raises up his weeping eyes. “My god, we did it.”

“To victory,” Musichetta says, and drinks.

\--

It is much later. You are walking home through Paris’ gutted streets in the early afternoon, all three of you brimming with Hucheloup’s generously donated wine. You have passed tipsy for deeper waters. Bossuet is hopelessly drunk; Musichetta, just as drunk, but never hopeless.

His wine-soaked state, together with his leg injury and general proclivity for clumsy misfortune, has led to Bossuet tumbling thrice over fallen stones. You and Musichetta have taken up post on either side of him, reducing the number of directions available in which he can fall. As you walk, you giggle and bump up familiarly against each others’ elbows. You are using an old piece of a bed to replace your cane, which was broken sometime in the night.

It has been years since Bossuet last thought to ask, but for some reason, in this strange smoke-scented and victorious afternoon, he pauses at the foot of the stairs up to your room. You catch Musichetta’s hand, and the two of you stand unsteadily on the stairs above him.

“May I come in?” he asks, slurring only slightly.

You look at him in bemusement. He comes here every day, and sleeps here most nights, and always steals the softest part of the bed without shame. You laugh at him a little, but despite his swaying he stares up at the two of you with earnest steady eyes. You stare back at him.

“I—” you start, but find you have interrupted yourself by leaning down and kissing him sloppily on the cheek, very close to the corner of his mouth. You pull back, but only by a little, and the two of you stand there for a moment sharing breath. You are too drunk and full-hearted to speak. But Musichetta, as always, knows your mind.

“Stupid boy,” she says, “you never need to ask.” Smiling her soft smile, she leads the two of you upstairs by the hand.

\--

You collapse into bed, too tired to change out of your dirty bloodstained clothes. Musichetta lies with her back against you and her legs tangled between yours. Her hands grasp loosely in the front of Bossuet’s shirt, and your arm lies heavy over her side, your fingers just barely brushing against the back of one of Bossuet’s open hands.

“You must wake me in an hour,” you say, “so I may assess my head injury again.”

You close your eyes, sleep already beginning to press down on you, but Bossuet and Musichetta, restless with drink, are speaking softly to each other. You listen.

“How did you know it was happening?” Bossuet asks. His voice is uncharacteristically somber.

“I heard them shouting in the streets,” Musichetta murmurs. “Noémie wanted us all to stay inside, but I knew.”

“We built the first barricade. Enjolras, and Combeferre, and everybody, and us.”

“I knew that too,” Musichetta says, though she couldn’t have.

“It was so loud.” Bossuet says. “It was so dark. We thought Jehan was dead. And we thought—”

There is a pause, and you realize with surprise that you can hear him crying. But Bossuet never cries. Maybe you are already dreaming.

“No one was coming,” he says finally. “And then Joly was gone. I lost him somewhere. I shouldn’t have lost him, Chetta.”

“Shhh,” she sooths him. You can feel her shoulder blade shifting. Perhaps she is lifting one hand to cup his cheek or wipe away his tears.

“I thought it was just my luck, you know. I thought it was my bad luck, just one more time, and it would keep me from ever seeing your face again, or holding you, or holding him, or hearing the tap of his stupid cane. Oh god,” he says, “I thought my bad luck would doom us all. We were fighting, and shooting, and screaming, and the city slept.”

“We woke up,” she says.

There is a silence, longer than before.

“Will this work?” he asks.

“The revolution?”

He shifts, the bed creaking a little. He takes your hand, gently, so as not to wake you. “No, this. After all of it. The three of us.”

“Yes,” she says without hesitation.

“I only really realized it last night, on the barricade. I can’t do it alone.” And then, his voice softer, a confession, “I can’t live without the two of you.”

“Of course you could.” Musichetta moves her head slightly toward him and her hair brushes gentle against your face. “But you don’t have to.”

There is another silence.

“I am probably the only person in the world to be happy about getting stabbed in the leg with a bayonet.” Bossuet laughs high and quiet, his throat still tight with his sudden bout of crying, and Musichetta lets her breath out in a helpless gust. “Thank god, I thought!” he crows quietly, and you can feel Musichetta shake against you, giggling with relief. “I am so blessed that the gods of luck have only stabbed me! Perhaps I will see my loves again!”

“He should look at your wound,” Musichetta says, trying to sound serious.

Bossuet chuckles, slowly deflating. “Combeferre gave it the once-over. It will be fine,” he says.

“In an hour, when we wake him,” she says.

“When we wake him.”

Somewhere out there, you think, Enjolras is busy speaking eloquently and furrowing his brow and creating the new French government. But here you are peaceful as you drift slowly off to sleep. Bossuet’s thumb moves slowly across the knuckles of your curled hand. Musichetta’s hair smells of burnt bread and wine.


End file.
